Friday, August 26, 2011

A new boss for Tibet

Zhang Qingli, the Party boss in the Tibetan Autonomous Region has been transferred to an unknown position.Is this move connected with the recent visit of Vice-President Xi Jinping's visit to Tibet? Difficult to say!In his first speech as Party Secretary, Chen Quanguo cited five times Hu Jintao and not a word of Xi Jinping. Does it mean that Chen will follow the hardline policies put in place by Hu Jintao when he was Tibet Party Secretary at the end of the 1980's (till 1992).Probably.One worrying sign has been that the hardliner Tibetan cadre Raidi has been seen everywhere in the Tibetan region since Xi Jinping’s visit (the Vice-President visited his house in Lhasa).He presided at the annual summer pastoral festival in his home prefecture of Nagchu.Poor nomads had to wave Red Flags.A knowledgeable friend pointed out “when the Chinese media would go into overdrive about the wonderful benefits of this or that policy, it meant that that policy probably existed nowhere in the country and officials not only were bickering among themselves about it but more importantly were having trouble getting the masses to even think about it. I suspect all this national flag business falls roughly into the same category.”

Raidi also participated in other official meetings in Nagchu and Lhasa.

He sat prominently on the stage during Third Meeting of the China Tibet Cultural Preservation and Development Forum next to Zhang Qingli, the then Party Secretary and read the Work Report for the Forum.All this means that the hardliners are not far. It is difficult to expect radical changes in the months to come.